Don't Make a Wave Committee

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The Don't Make a Wave Committee was formed in October 1969 in Vancouver, Canada to protest and attempt to halt underground nuclear testing by the United States in the National Wildlife refuge at Amchitka in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. The name of the committee was reputed to have come from a placard which said Don't Make a Wave. It's Your Fault if Our Fault Goes. A 1969 demonstration of 10,000 people blocked a major US-Canadian border crossing, protesting that the tests may trigger a tidal wave similar to one generated by an earthquake in 1964 which struck the west coast of North America.

Founding members of the committee included Jim and Marie Bohlen, Paul Cote, Irving and Dorothy Stowe. Founding members were prominent in the Society of Friends (Quakers) and the Sierra Club in Vancouver, Canada. The committee initially worked under the aegis of the Sierra Club, however in 1971 when it was announced a protest vessel would travel to the test site, the Sierra Club objected and the committee changed to working independently of the Sierra Club.

During meetings in 1970 Bill Darnell combined the words ‘green’ and ‘peace’, thereby giving the organization its first expedition name, and what would later transform into one of the largest global environment organisations, Greenpeace. Many Canadians protested the United States military underground nuclear bomb tests, codenamed Cannikin, beneath the island of Amchitka, Alaska in 1971. The Don't Make a Wave Committee first expedition hired the Phyllis Cormack, a halibut seiner available for charter, to take protestors to the testing zone on the island of Amchitka. The expedition was called Greenpeace I, and included Canadian journalist Robert Hunter. Considerable negative publicity for the nuclear tests was generated by the protest.

A noted early member of the organisation was Paul Watson, although work and study commitments prevented him from being on Greenpeace I. He was a member of the crew of the chartered relief ship, the former minesweeper Edgewater Fortune, which was renamed the Greenpeace Too!. One day out of Amchitka the United States Atomic Energy Commission exploded a Hydrogen bomb underground a day early on November 6, 1971. The United States cancelled a second test.

On 4 May 1972, following Dorothy Stowe's departure from the chairmanship of the Don't Make A Wave Committee, the fledgling environmental group officially changed its name to the "Greenpeace Foundation". Later that year David McTaggart would sail his yacht, Greenpeace III, to French Polynesia to oppose the French atmospheric nuclear tests at Mururoa atoll, supported by the new Greenpeace Foundation.